


Here

by celiazwrites



Series: After [1]
Category: Veronica Mars (Movie 2014), Veronica Mars (TV), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Family, Fix-It, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-24 19:02:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22002919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celiazwrites/pseuds/celiazwrites
Summary: The sixth explosion wasn't a bomb. It was an extraction.
Relationships: Logan Echolls/Veronica Mars
Series: After [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1672321
Comments: 38
Kudos: 100





	1. Home

**Author's Note:**

> Did I do it? Did I fix Season 4?

Her skills were rusty, sure, her PI license expired and her high-mag camera lens tucked away in a tangle of extension cords, worn-out towels, and Christmas re-gifts in the hallway closet. But Veronica Mars still knew how to spot a tail.

Whoever was following her wasn’t being particularly careful. Driving too closely behind her; parking in the same lot as her at the grocery store instead of on the street around the corner. The car was nondescript; beige sedan, could use a wash, a bank of leaves crusted beneath the windshield wipers. Tinted windows, at least; that much let her know the driver meant business.

She waited to make her move. Loaded her groceries into the trunk of her car without a glance over her shoulder. Apples tumbled to the asphalt; she cursed loudly. _Clumsy me_. Squatted to retrieve them, and honed in on the sedan’s front-facing license plate, visible in the space just vacated by a woman in Lululemons whom Veronica had peripherally watched load up a silver Explorer with a herd of children and reusable totes.

Digits memorized, she sprang up, apples in hand, slammed the trunk shut and hopped into the driver’s seat. Texted the number to herself before she could forget it, then pulled into reverse and made her way home.

The beige sedan didn’t follow. _Curiouser and curiouser_.

California plate X57MS6, according to state records, belonged to one Frances Pollack, 2750 Knotted Tree Lane. The next day, Veronica found the address in one of those neighbourhoods where every house looked a little bit different, mailboxes painted all different colors, one even shaped like a manatee. Quirky—rarer and rarer these days. A pair of girls on Razor scooters looped up and down a nearby driveway, occasional peals of laughter cutting through the still air.

The sedan was parked directly in front of #2750. _It can’t possibly be this easy._ Veronica strode up to Frances’ door and knocked deliberately, putting on her brightest smile.

Frances Pollack was about one thousand years old. Small and shaky, with squinting eyes hidden behind enormous glasses. She was about half as tall as Veronica, and twice as loud. “YES?” she asked, looking up.

“Hi, I was driving by here the other day and I could’ve sworn there was a ‘for sale’ sign on that car outside. Am I too late? Did someone snag it already?” She smiled sweetly. _Still got it, Mars_.

Frances blinked slowly. Once. Twice. Then: “ARE YOU VERONICA?”

“Sorry—have we met?”

“HOLD ON.” She tottered away, letting the door swing shut in Veronica’s astonished face. A minute later, she was back, holding out a folded index card with a shaky hand. “FOR YOU.”

Veronica took it cautiously. “You wanted me to find you,” she realized. “You’re not a tail. You’re a messenger.”

Frances Pollack shrugged, which only made her look more owl than human. “HAVE A NICE DAY.” And then she was gone, door shut behind her.

Still on Frances’ front step, Veronica unfurled the index card. It had been folded into quarters, neatly creased, lined side out. On the plain side, a typed message, all lower-case, bold Times New Roman:

_**jump street** _

The card fell from her hands. This was a prank, clearly; but a particularly cruel one, almost six years to the day since… She didn’t want to relive that memory. Not right now; not when it already played and replayed in her head every night.

The Camelot had changed hands long before Big Dick Casablancas had catalyzed the gentrification of Neptune, but the building’s latest incarnation was only a few months old—a “mixed-use complex” featuring a shared workspace, a vegan bakery, an eyebrow salon, and a coterie of “short-term housing” designed to attract tenants without the unbearable drag of a lease or, you know, any basic tenants’ rights. The room where she had been taken by the narc was now a yoga studio; the balcony outside of it—she smiled. She couldn’t help it, remembering.

Veronica was surprised to find that she knew the yoga instructor—a former client, whose wife, Iranian, had been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time without her immigration papers on hand. “Veronica!” Shira exclaimed, smiling as she entered. “I’ve been expecting you.”

“That’s been happening a lot today.” Veronica stepped toward the counter, behind which Shira was rifling through a drawer. “What cryptic clue have you got for me?”

“No clue,” Shira said. “Just—this.” She shut the drawer and placed on the counter a silver thumb drive.

“Who gave it to you?” It was worth asking, even though she already knew what Shira would say.

“I don’t know.” _Of course not_. “They left it taped to the window a few days ago, with a note that said you’d come by looking for it.” _Of course they did._ “It’s all very mysterious, isn’t it?”

“Very.” Veronica picked up the thumb drive. No markings; not even a brand name or logo. “Thank you, Shira.” She turned to go.

“Free yoga any time, Veronica. What you did for Maryam—we can never repay you. Truly.”

“I’m not much of a yoga person. Can I send my dad?”

Shira laughed. “Send whoever you like. Open invitation.”

The image of her father attempting a sun salutation kept her anxiety at bay for the car ride home. But as soon as she crossed inside, she made a beeline for her study. Dug her old laptop out of the bottom desk drawer—cracked screen, and a little slow, but otherwise functional. She didn’t want to compromise her work files in case this insanely elaborate prank turned out to be not-so-harmless. 

There was one file on the jump drive; a video labelled “WHAT HAPPENED.mp4.” She positioned the cursor, squeezed her eyes shut, and clicked.

“ _Veronica_.”

His voice— _his_ voice. This truly had taken a turn for the cruel. He was saying more words but she stopped listening, dizzy, furious. She opened her eyes.

It was Logan, but it wasn’t Logan. This Logan was older. Exhausted. Eyes… empty. A thin scar snaked along the right side of his face, from his temple to his chin. This wasn’t Logan; this was a ghost. And the ghost was still talking.

“... _t_ _hings I wish I hadn’t done. Things I can never tell you about—tell anyone about_ …”

She slammed down on the space bar; the sudden silence barely registered, her ears were ringing. Like they had that day, an explosion, a siren, shattered glass. She closed her eyes again. Breathed in slowly, breathed out, and wished she had taken Shira up on a yoga lesson right then and there.

Then she toggled back to the beginning of the video, and pressed Play.

“ _Veronica_ ,” said the ghost. “ _I_ _f you’re watching this video, it means you’ve met Frances. Would you believe she’s former CIA?”_ He laughed dryly; it almost wasn’t a laugh at all. “ _I don’t have today’s newspaper, or any way to prove to you that this isn’t some elaborate deep-fake. But you need to know this: The sixth explosion wasn’t a bomb. It was an extraction.”_

“ _I—_ ” The ghost faltered. “ _I had knowledge of something I shouldn’t have. Foreign actors wanted to get it, and thought I was the best way. Thought_ you _were the best way. My superior officer caught chatter of a plan to kidnap you, to offer your life if I committed treason in exchange._ ” He almost-laughed again. “ _I would have done it, you know. Saved you. Shining armour and all that. But I never got the chance. Things were so far beyond my control, I—_ ” He shook his head. “ _These past six years, I’ve done things I wish I hadn’t done. Things I can never tell you about—tell anyone about._ ”

It dawned on Veronica, in the slow-then-sudden way you realize that a rainstorm has come and passed while you were inside your home, safe and dry, oblivious—Logan was alive. This was real. This was actually, legitimately happening. The man she had buried and grieved and hated and loved—her husband. He was alive.

She should feel happy, but she felt—nothing. Numb. Shock wasn’t even the right word; just—nothing. Frozen.

“ _It’s over now_ ,” the ghost was saying. Not a ghost; Logan. Actually Logan. “ _I have my honorable discharge, my declaration of death has been reversed… The last thing I want to do is barge back into your life like this, Veronica. I hope you’ve moved on, and that you’re happy, and in love, and have a family, and have the most wonderful, amazing life that you so deserve. But I didn’t want you to find out some other, awful way. Two years from now, or ten, some paper gets declassified, some journalist remembers the name of that movie star’s son—I thought this would be better. Maybe not—maybe… I don’t know, Veronica. I’m just… I’m so sorry._ ”

“We’re home!” The sound of her dad’s voice, the front door shutting, two pairs of tiny feet careening down the hall. Veronica’s heart leapt; all the nothing she had been feeling, suddenly blossomed into a raging, joyous, terrifying, terrified melancholy that caught in her throat and trapped her voice and paralyzed her where she sat so she couldn’t call out, couldn’t shut the door or even pause the video when her favourite two people in the world barrelled into her study to tell her all about the movie Grandpa had taken them to see, beaming up at her with _his_ smile, _his_ eyes.

When her exclamation of “Penguins!” didn’t elicit the expected excitement from her mom, Xan frowned, crinkling her nose. Caleb stood on his tiptoes to peer at the computer screen. “Are you watching a movie, too?”

“Sweetie, I might need to bill you for the popcorn we went through—” She hadn’t noticed her dad enter the room, but she noticed when his voice suddenly cut off as he caught sight of the video. Logan was still talking: “ _...San Diego. You can contact me…_ ”

“Dad,” she began, but it came out as a whisper.

“Hey kiddos, have you washed your hands yet?” He shooed the twins out of the room and waited until he heard running water, then gently shut the door. 

“Not exactly in the parenting books, is it?” she deadpanned. “‘What To Expect When Your Husband Comes Back from the Dead.’”

“Is it real?” her dad asked. “Could be a hoax. Could be some desperate tabloid writer trying to engineer a story where there isn’t one.”

She shook her head. “It’s real. This is real.” She buried her face in her hands, pressing her palms against her eyes until she saw shooting stars. Then she leaned back into the chair. She felt small. “Dad. What do I do?”

He exhaled. Shook his head in a way that conveyed all the astonishment she felt, and then some. “Did he leave a way to get in touch?”

She nodded. She’d have to rewind the video to catch it again, but he had given a phone number.

“Then I guess that’s where you should start.”


	2. Away

The Holiday Inn Express at the San Diego Airport boasted a continental breakfast so bold, so luxurious, as to have fresh berries free for the taking, every single morning. And so, every single morning for the past five days, Logan had filed out of Room 604, filled a styrofoam bowl with a decadent helping of blueberries and strawberries, thinly sliced, and returned to his room to eat the berries in silence while gazing out the window, watching the planes that flew close as they landed. 

Today, he returned to the room and ate the berries and watched the planes, and didn’t notice when his phone pinged with a text message. He had left it on vibrate on the bathroom counter, and wouldn’t discover the notification until he stepped in to brush his teeth exactly eight minutes later.

It was a video attachment from an unknown number. All numbers were unknown; he’d had this phone for less than a week. He didn’t dare to get his hopes up.

But then he opened the attachment and there she was, looking exactly as he remembered her, as he’d pictured her in the moments when he thought for sure his life was about to end. There had been too many of those moments over the past six years.

Her voice sounded the same, too. “ _Logan_ ,” she said, and it made him think of the day he had punched an ATF agent on the top floor of the Camelot Hotel, and then kissed her on the balcony. He smiled. He couldn’t help it, remembering.

“ _I grieved for you. I watched them lower your casket into the ground. I bought a plane ticket to_ Virginia _, of all places, to watch the U.S. military put on a whole show about your death. You had trumpets, Logan._ Trumpets.”

He laughed, even though it hurt to watch her, to hear the pain in her voice, to see it in her eyes. He had caused that. She had lived it.

“ _Two weeks after the trumpets and the flags and more trumpets and about a thousand platters of tiny, useless sandwiches—egg salad? Seriously?—two weeks after I goddamn_ buried you _, I found out that I was pregnant. Two weeks after_ that _, I found out that there were two of them._ ” She was crying now; he watched as she brushed her hair back, using the motion to discreetly wipe her face with the side of her hand. Her words hadn’t registered yet; he heard them, but they didn’t mean anything, as though she had spoken them in the wrong order.

“ _Twins—you never do anything by halves, do you, Echolls?”_ She laughed in a way that was more of a gasp. “ _And now I have no idea how to tell them that their dead father, who we fly out to Arlington once a year to go see his grave, and do the stupid thing with the flowers and the flags and the trumpets—oh by the way, just kidding, he’s actually alive! And in California!_ ”

“Oh.” He said it out loud; he could imagine a sadistic cartoonist drawing the speech bubble in bold strokes of ink as Veronica’s words shifted into the right order, the right meaning, and tossed around in his brain like the world’s most terrifying game of Yahtzee. His heart skipped; his breath halted. He toggled the video back: “ _...I was pregnant… There were two of them… Their dead father…_ ”

He had imagined thousands of realities; he’d had plenty of time to imagine all of them, in the bowels of a Saudi prison, then again on an aircraft carrier positioned at coordinates he wasn’t even cleared to know. Veronica married to Piz; Veronica married to Mac. Veronica murdered, Veronica with cancer, Veronica wounded in the line of duty. Maybe she had cut her hair, become a news anchor, moved to Seattle, taken up bowling, written a bestselling expose about the Neptune bomber. He liked to imagine futures where she was happy. Even ones where she had kids—someone to love and protect, the two things she was best at.

This— _this—_ was not a reality that had even slightly crossed his mind. This was some outlandish, alien, alternate timeline that had him watching Veronica’s video again, and then a third time, and then pressing the dialback button on the unknown number, almost without thought, reflexive, until her voice answered “Hello?” and he froze, terrified.

“Logan?” she asked, hushed, hesitant.

“What—” he began, startling himself with the sound of his own voice, shaking. “What are their names?”

“Ohmygod.” He could hear the tears in her voice just as he felt them streaming down his own face. “Ohmygod. It’s really you.”

He didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know what to say.”

She inhaled; the sound of her breathing reassured him, somehow. Familiar. “Caleb, and Alexandra,” she said.

“Caleb and Alexandra,” he repeated, and let the names ring again and again in his head. Caleb, his son. Alexandra, his daughter. He forced himself to think the words so they would feel real, and maybe less terrifying.

“We call her Xan,” Veronica added, interrupting. “She likes penguins. And Caleb likes to sing. Would you believe it—we joined a church, just so he can sing with the other kids. Xan hates it. Every Sunday. Bored out of her mind. Last week she made a paper airplane out of the bulletin and threw it before I could stop her. Landed on the offertory plate.”

She was rambling, nervous, overwhelmed, but there was warmth in her voice, even through the tears. A sudden sob—but it wasn’t Veronica. It was him.

He breathed, swallowed. Ran his hand across his face.

“I’m going to text you something,” she said gently. “Hang on.” The phone vibrated in his hand; he lowered it from his ear and opened the photo attachment.

There was a boy and a girl grinning, each holding a sesame bagel bigger than their face. They sat together in a restaurant booth, grinning and posing with their enormous bagels, and Logan could imagine Veronica grinning too as she snapped the picture, laughing. “ _Say cream cheese!”_ she would have instructed.

The boy had light blond hair and a small, upturned nose and eyes that were so familiar it scared him. The girl had darker hair pulled into a tight bun, and was wearing a karate uniform. She had a sprinkling of freckles across her nose, and a smile so like Veronica’s it took his breath away.

Veronica’s voice, garbled, muted. He lifted the phone back to his ear. “Sorry?”

“I was just checking if you were still there.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Had a lot of fun with this. It's been ages since I've written anything so feedback is welcome :)


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